


Genesis

by emungere



Category: Trigun
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2003-12-10
Updated: 2003-12-10
Packaged: 2018-02-28 22:22:21
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,535
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2749289
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/emungere/pseuds/emungere
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Today Juneora Rock bakes silently under the two suns. You can smell              the heat in the air, see it rising in waves off the rocks, taste it              as your tongue dries to scales with every breath you take. The city              is deserted. I have seen no one since dawn.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Genesis

**Author's Note:**

> Spoilers for vol. 3, chapters 18 and 20 of the manga and for the anime episode Paradise. Both the Bible quotes are taken from the King James version.

Today Juneora Rock bakes silently under the two suns. You can smell the heat in the air, see it rising in waves off the rocks, taste it as your tongue dries to scales with every breath you take. The city is deserted. I have seen no one since dawn.

On the ground a few feet away I spot a scrap of red and pounce on it before the wind can steal it from me. A piece of his coat. I've been picking them up all morning. It seems wrong to let them lie in the dust.

Vash the Stampede. A man I've barely met, a man who saved my life when I was ready to give up and let the desert take me at last. And now the desert has taken him, and all I can find are these blood-colored fragments. And, the weight at my back reminds me, one other fragment.

I don't have a holster big enough, so his gun rides tucked into my waistband, a constant presence. It's a massive thing. I fired it once, just to know how it felt. The kickback nearly knocked me off my feet. I stared at it afterwards, cradling it in hands that seemed suddenly much too small.

I remembered holding another gun, that first gun, with arms that shook, not from fear, but from the sheer weight of it pulling on a child's frail muscles. I remembered the way the metal was cold under my hands and how it soothed me. I remembered the roar it made when I killed him. It seemed to encompass the world.

The day is locked in my mind, its sequence of events spread out one after another like a trail to follow back to my childhood, but it leads to a dead end. Before that day, I remember almost nothing. Pictures crop up now and then, usually when I have no time to examine them. There is only one clear memory before that day.

It is the night before, and I am praying. I kneel by the edge of my bed and my arms stretch up so I can rest my elbows on the mattress. I am praying, not to God, but to my angel. He is a child's vision of an angel, golden hair and blue eyes, white-feathered wings and infinite compassion.

Even at seven, I know he doesn't exist, but more than anything else in the world I want him to exist. I pray with my eyes squinched tight shut and my hands squeezed together hard, as if I can bring him into being by a physical effort.

I want someone to save me.

In the morning, as I hear heavy footsteps coming for me yet again, I will decide to save myself, but my angel's face will never leave me.

Dawn woke me this morning, and I looked down from the spire of stone where I'd spent the night to see the last few inhabitants fleeing the city. They were specks from so high up, but they trailed their early-morning shadows after them like unwound shrouds.

When I turned back from the edge, not five feet from where I stood I saw a light coming from a crack in the rock. An hour later, a change in the angle of the suns, and I might never have found it. I had to lay flat down and stretch my arm as far as I could before the tips of my fingers touched it. It was lodged upside down, and I could just slip one finger inside the trigger guard and bring it up.

No bus will come here now, but I found a motorcycle abandoned a few hundred yarz out in the desert. A few hours work is all it needs. And then...

Then I'll find him, and give him back his gun. Because I don't know what else to do.

What I saw last night is fading from my mind already. I can't seem to contain the images or connect them with reality. If not for the devastation around me, I would believe it was a dream. Still, if I can't remember clearly, neither can I quite forget.

The day after I murdered my guardian hangs on in the same way. Disconnected, improbable events, strung together one after another. I don't know why I went to the church, nor do I remember walking there. I see the scene as a snapshot from outside my body. My head is bent as I kneel before the altar, and Chapel is standing off to one side, watching me. He leads me to the confession box, and my fate is sealed.

That feeling of one path taken and another forsaken forever is one I have learned to recognize since that day. I felt it yesterday when the bus pulled up, though I didn't know why, and I feel it more strongly now.

Chapel taught me to read, and the Bible was my first book. In Genesis, chapter 3, verse 26, it says, "So he drove out the man: and he placed at the east of the garden of Eden cherubim, and a flaming sword which turned every way, to keep the way of the tree of life."

After I read that passage, I asked Chapel what the cherubim were. He told me they were angels, warriors in God's Host. I remember combing the Bible the next day to see what happened to that angel with his sword of fire. Chapel left me alone, glad to see me reading by my own choice for once.

His Bible smelled like old paper and dust, and the corners of the pages were grimed from the touch of a thousand fingers. By the end of the day, my hands smelled of old paper too, and the drag of my finger across the pages as I struggled with the words had left that fingertip dark with ink. Angels danced behind my eyes.

Angelos... the word means messenger in some long forgotten language. They were God's messengers, speaking with His voice, enforcing His will, punishing His enemies. God's messengers were truly warriors, and God's messages were steeped in pain and death.

That night I dreamed of my angel. His face was the same, but his wings were stained with rust-colored blood, old and soaked into the feathers until it seemed almost their natural color. He seemed more beautiful to me than ever.

I turned to him more and more after that. There was no one else to turn to. I remember nights spent with my head under the blankets, talking to him in whispers until I half believed he was real. I wanted so badly to believe.

Chapel wasn't cruel, but it was not an easy life. And he never pretended to care for me.

I was sixteen when I found another passage, one I had passed over many times before.

Genesis, chapter 6, verse 2: "...The sons of God saw the daughters of men that they were fair; and they took them wives of all which they chose."

Angels, taking humans to their beds, right there in the Bible.

In my dreams that night, my angel carried me away on his sullied wings, but when he set me down his fingers raised my face to his, and he kissed me beside a cool stream, with leaves falling around us onto the damp grass.

It wasn't a long step from that to jerking off with his face in my mind. He'd been with me ever since I could remember, and I was half in love with him by then. Or maybe more than half.

Years passed, and I thought of other things. I put him aside like a childhood toy, but I never forgot him.

His face came back to me yesterday in the desert, clear as a waking dream. The suns blistered my skin and pounded on my head as I whispered through cracked lips, praying as hard as I had that night when I was seven. When I became conscious of what I was saying, I realized I was begging him to come for my soul when I died.

Rescue was the last thing on my mind. I thought it was another hallucination until I tasted the water. Then the girls pointed me toward the back of the bus.

He was looking at me out of the corner of his eye, with one spike of hair drooping down across his face. The coat was blood red; his hair was the perfect gold of my dreams, and his face...

It was my angel's face, exactly as I had imagined it. As if I had seen that face somewhere when I was very young and it had stayed with me through all those years. I knew it was impossible, I even knew who this man had to be, and still it was all I could do to cover my reaction.

Vash the Stampede, outlaw gunman, humanoid typhoon, destroyer of Lost July. I saw the strength and compassion in his face, and I wanted... oh, God, I wanted.

But it was, had to be, coincidence. So I told myself. Until Juneora Rock, when I saw his wings.


End file.
